Superficial 'Intelligence'

Near the beginning of "Intelligence," CBS's futuristic spy thriller, one character tells another that "no one here uses more syllables than you have to."

Would that it were so. On the contrary, the characters in the show are quite fond of using more syllables than necessary; the ancient writerly injunction "show, don't tell" seems not to have made the slightest impression on their creators.

Intelligence

Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBS

ENLARGE

Josh Holloway and Meghan Ory
CBS

The "here" referred to is the United States Cyber Command, a military agency which in the real world is tasked with protecting U.S. and Allied "freedom of action in cyberspace" and denying "the same to our adversaries." In "Intelligence," the agency is responsible for Clockwork, a project with obscure roots in World War II-era efforts to counter a Nazi "doomsday weapon."

Housed in a section of the Cyber Command building conveniently identified by a huge sign that reads "Clockwork," the project's staff has been busy creating a superagent with extraordinary powers—including the ability to recall secret information by walking through it in three dimensions, as if in a lucid dream.

The agent is Gabriel Vaughn, played by
Josh Holloway,
who reprises his handsome, edgy, frequently squinting bad-boy-with-a-conscience character from "Lost"—only this time the bad boy draws a government salary. Gabriel's physical and mental prowess add to his tendency toward insubordination and risk-taking, which is why Cyber Command arranges for the lovely Riley Neal (
Meghan Ory
), a member of the Secret Service, to protect and keep him in line.

Gabriel initially resists his minder, which raises tensions between them, punctuated by awkward wisecracks. "Come on, I thought this was the part we share and bond," says Vaughn at the outset of the duo's first mission, to which Riley responds: "Sounds like it's the part I figure out how much of a pain in the ass you are."

Rogue Chinese agents have kidnapped Clockwork's resident neuroscientist (
John Billingsley
), the genius who invented the chip implanted in Gabriel's brain. (Rogue, because the spook behind the kidnapping "rejects the reforms in my country," says the People's Republic's liberal and conciliatory spy chief in Washington—one of the show's more fantastical creations, which is saying a lot.)

For Gabriel, the kidnapping is personal. The professor is a father figure of sorts to him, and a Rambo-style assault on the Chinese agents' lair is in order. And what better place for Communist evildoers to locate their headquarters than at a dark paintball club throbbing with techno music and covered in glow-in-the-dark paint?

The action sequences that ensue are intriguing enough. The trouble is that the show doesn't trust the viewer's capacity to infer. Nor does it tolerate the slightest ambiguity. Thus we get long, dull passages of dialogue: "While other agencies have been trying to make artificial intelligence more human, we gave a human the kind of power that previously has only been found in a machine," says Clockwork's icy, blonde director Lillian Strand (
Marg Helgenberger
). That's because "now we face new and insidious threats." The Department of Homeland Security has probably issued press releases with more natural flair.

At another point, Lillian recounts how Riley had earlier in her career thwarted an attempt to kidnap the U.S. president's daughters: "Stabbed four times, she incapacitated all four [assailants] and still managed to get those girls home for dinner." Who in the real world speaks in brutal, expository sentences like this, designed to establish that a certain character is One Tough Lady?

There is a more fundamental problem with "Intelligence," namely that it mistakes contemporaneity for innovation. All those references to Stuxnet (the computer virus allegedly used by Western governments to temporarily set back Iran's nuclear program) and cyberwarfare and a rising China and so on do not—without more—move the genre forward. The very best sci-fi on television in recent years—think of
J.J. Abrams
vehicles like "Lost" and "Fringe" or the earlier "X-Files"—has attracted audiences by combining contemporary concerns and the latest special effects with the genre's more timeless bedrocks: a genuine sense of mystery, a depth of ideas, a little soul. There's very little of any of these things on offer here.

—Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal. Nancy DeWolf Smith is on vacation.

To Catch a Trader

Tuesday at 10 p.m. on PBS

Federal prosecutors' legal campaign against hedge-fund manager
Steven A. Cohen
and his firm, SAC Capital Advisors, reached a less than climactic dénouement in November. The firm pleaded guilty to criminal insider-trading charges and agreed to both wind down its business and pay a record $1.2 billion in penalties; six employees also pleaded guilty, and a senior manager was later convicted at trial. But the government faced an uphill battle in proving that Mr. Cohen himself was more than negligent, and so he avoided criminal charges.

The SAC affair provides a terrific educational window into the questions involved in insider trading: What are the duties of sophisticated actors in the financial markets with respect to less sophisticated actors? Is insider-trading a victimless crime and, if so, with what implications? How clear is the line between obtaining "material, nonpublic information"—proscribed by U.S. securities laws—and merely acting on rumors?

These aren't easy questions, and they divide reasonable people. Alas, PBS Frontline fails to treat them with the seriousness and complexity they demand. Instead, Frontline correspondent
Martin Smith
so completely identifies with regulators as to foreclose even the possibility that there might be another side to the story. The impression of the financial industry created, including through the use of cheesy re-enactments, is relentlessly squalid: open tabs and Midtown duplexes and lobster shipments—all underwritten by the greed of men and women who "eat what [they] kill," as one subject puts it.

To be sure, much of the Wall Street behavior described via wiretaps and court transcripts is squalid. But Frontline does its viewers no favors by loading the script with its point-of-view bombast. Or by claiming that the merely negligent behavior of bankers should be subject to criminal liability as though that were an inarguable point.

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